The Committee on Franchises was in session in one of the committee rooms outside the chamber of the New York State Senate. It was not a routine session. A bill was before it, the purpose of which was virtually to dispossess some four or five hundred families of their homes in the counties of Hamilton, Tupper and Racquette. The bill did not say this. It cited the need of adequate transportation in that part of the State and proposed that the U. & M. Railroad should be granted the right of eminent domain over three thousand square miles of the region, in order to help the development of the country.

The committee was composed of five members, three of the majority party in the Senate and two of the minority. A political agent of the railroad who drew a salary from Racquette County as a judge had just finished presenting to the committee the reasons why the people of that part of the State were unanimous in the wish that the bill should become a law. He had drawn a pathetic picture of the condition of the farmers, so long deprived of the benefits of a railroad. He had 104 almost wept as he told of the rich loads of produce left to rot up there in the hills because the men who toiled to produce it had no means of bringing it down to the starving thousands of the cities. The scraggy rocks and thinly soiled farms of that region became in his picture vast reservoirs of cheap food, only waiting to be tapped by the beneficent railroad for the benefit of the world’s poor.

When the judge had finished, one minority member of the committee looked at his colleague, the other minority member, and winked. It was a grave and respectful wink. It meant that the committee was not often privileged to listen to quite such bare-faced effrontery. If the hearing had been a secret one they would not have listened to it. But the bill had already aroused a storm. So the leader of the majority had given orders that the hearing should be public.

So far not a word had been said as to the fact which underlay the motives of the bill. Iron had been found in workable quantities in those three thousand square miles of hill country. Not a word had been said about iron.

No one in the room had listened to the speech with any degree of interest. It was intended entirely for the consumption of the outside public. Even the reporters had sat listless and bored during its delivery. They had been furnished with advance copies of it and had already turned them 105 in to their papers. But with the naming of the next witness a stir of interest ran sharply around the room.

Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden rose from his place in the rear of the room and walked briskly forward to the chair reserved. A tall, spare figure of a man coming to his sixty years, his hair as white as the snow of his hills, with a large, firm mouth and the nose of a Puritan governor, he would have attracted attention under almost any circumstances.

Nathan Gorham, the chairman of the committee, had received his orders from the leader of the majority in the Senate that the bill should be reported back favourably to that body before night. He had anticipated no difficulty. The form of a public hearing had to be gone through with. It was the most effective way of disarming the suspicions that had been aroused as to the nature of the bill. The speech of the Racquette County Judge was the usual thing at public hearings. The chairman had expected that one or two self-advertising reformers of the opposition would come before the committee with time-honoured, stock diatribes against the rapacity and greed of railroads in general and this one in particular. Then he and his two majority colleagues would vote to report the bill favourably, while the two members of the minority would vote to report adversely. This, the chairman said, was about all a public 106 hearing ever amounted to. He had not counted on the coming of the Bishop of Alden.

“The committee would like to hear, sir,” began the chairman, as the Bishop took his place, “whom you represent in the matter of this bill.”

The reporters, scenting a welcome sensation in what had been a dull session of a dull committee, sat with poised pencils while the Bishop turned a look of quiet gravity upon the chairman and said:

“I represent Joseph Winthrop, a voter of Racquette County.”

“I beg pardon, sir, of course. The committee quite understands that you do not come here in the interest of any one. But the gentleman who has just been before us spoke for the farmers who would be most directly affected by the prosperity of the railroad, including those of your county. Are we to understand that there is opposition in your county to the proposed grant?”

“Your committee,” said the Bishop, “cannot be ignorant that there is the most stubborn opposition to this grant in all three counties. If there had not been that opposition, there would have been no call for the bill which you are now considering. If the railroad could have gotten the options which it tried to get on those farms the grant would have been given without question. Your committee knows this better than I.”

“But,” returned the chairman, “we have been advised that the railroad was not able to get those 107 options because a boy up there in the Beaver River country, who fancied that he had some grievance against the railroad people, banded the people together to oppose the options in unfair and unlawful ways.”

The chairman paused an impressive moment.

“In fact,” he resumed, “from what this committee has been able to gather, it looks very much as though there were conspiracy in the matter, against the U. & M. Railroad. It almost would seem that some rival of the railroad in question had used the boy and his fancied grievance to manufacture opposition. Conspiracy could not be proven, but there was every appearance.”

The Bishop smiled grimly as he dropped his challenge quietly at the feet of the committee.

“The boy, Jeffrey Whiting,” he said, “was guided by me. I directed his movements from the beginning.”

The whole room sat up and leaned forward as one man, alive to the fact that a novel and stirring situation was being developed. Everybody had understood that the Bishop had come to plead the cause of the French-Canadian farmers of the hills.

They had supposed that he would speak only on what was a side issue of the case. No one had expected that he would attack the main question of the bill itself. And here he was openly proclaiming himself the principal in that silent, stubborn 108 fight that had been going on up in the hills for six months!

The reporters doubled down to their work and wrote furiously. They were trying to throw this unusual man upon a screen before their readers. It was not easy. He was an unmistakable product of New England, and what was more he had been one of the leaders of that collection of striking men who made the Brook Farm “Experiment.” He had endeared himself to the old generation of Americans by his war record as a chaplain. To some of the new generation he was known as the Yankee Bishop. But in the hill country, from the Mohawk Valley to the Canadian line and to Lake Champlain, he had one name, The Shepherd of the North. From Old Forge to Ausable to North Creek men knew his ways and felt the beating of the great heart of him behind the stern, ascetic set of his countenance.

As much as they could of this the reporters were trying to put into their notes while Nathan Gorham was recovering from his surprise. That well-trained statesman saw that he had let himself into a trap. He had been too zealous in announcing his impression that the opposition to the U. & M. Railroad was the work of a jealous rival. The Bishop had taken that ground from under him by a simple stroke of truth. He could neither go forward with his charge nor could he retract it.

“Would you be so kind, then, as to tell this committee,” he temporised, “just why you wished to arouse this opposition to the railroad?”

“There is not and has never been any opposition whatever to the railroad,” said the Bishop. “The bill before your committee has nothing to do with the right of way of the railroad. That has already been granted. Your bill proposes to confiscate, practically, from the present owners a strip of valuable land forty miles wide by nearly eighty miles long. That land is valuable because the experts of the railroad know, and the people up there know, and, I think, this committee knows that there is iron ore in these hills.

“I have said that I do not represent any one here,” the Bishop went on. “But there are four hundred families up there in our hills who stand to suffer by this bill. They are a silent people. They have no voice to reach the world. I have asked to speak before your committee because only in this way can the case of my people reach the great, final trial court of publicity before the whole State.

“They are a silent people, the people of the hills. You will have heard that they are a stubborn people. They are a stubborn people, for they cling to their rocky soil and to the hillside homes that their hands have made just as do the hardy trees of the hills. You cannot uproot them by the stroke of a pen.

“These people are my friends and my neighbours. Many of them were once my comrades. I know what they think. I know what they feel. I would beg your committee to consider very earnestly this question before bringing to bear against these people the sovereign power of the State. They love their State. Many of them have loved their country to the peril of their lives. They live on the little farms that their fathers literally hewed out of a resisting wilderness.

“Not through prejudice or ignorance are they opposing this development, which will in the end be for the good of the whole region. They are opposed to this bill before you because it would give a corporation power to drive them from the homes they love, and that without fair compensation.

“They are opposed to it because they are Americans. They know what it has meant and what it still means to be Americans. And they know that this bill is directly against everything that is American.

“They are ever ready to submit themselves to the sovereign will of the State, but you will never convince them that this bill is the real will of the State. They are fighting men and the sons of fighting men. They have fought the course of the railroad in trying to get options from them by coercion and trickery. They have been aroused. 111 Their homes, poor and wretched as they often are, mean more to them than any law you can set on paper. They will fight this law, if you pass it. It will set a ring of fire and murder about our peaceful hills.

“In the name of high justice, in the name of common honesty, in the name––to come to lower levels––of political common sense, I tell you this bill should never go back to the Senate.

“It is wrong, it is unjust, and it can only rebound upon those who are found weak enough to let it pass here.”

The Bishop paused, and the racing, jabbing pencils of the reporters could be plainly heard in the hush of the room.

Nathan Gorham broke the pause with a hesitating question which he had been wanting to put from the beginning.

“Perhaps the committee has been badly informed,” he began to the Bishop; “we understood that your people, sir, were mostly Canadian immigrants and not usually owners of land.”

“Is it necessary for me to repeat,” said the Bishop, turning sharply, “that I am here, Joseph Winthrop, speaking of and for my neighbours and my friends? Does it matter to them or to this committee that I wear the badge of a service that they do not understand? I do not come before you as the Catholic bishop. Neither do I come as an owner of property. I come because I think 112 the cause of my friends will be served by my coming.

“The facts I have laid before you, the warning I have given might as well have been sent out direct through the press. But I have chosen to come before you, with your permission, because these facts will get a wider hearing and a more eager reading coming from this room.

“I do not seek to create sensation here. I have no doubt that some of you are thinking that the place for a churchman to speak is in his church. But I am willing to face that criticism. I am willing to create sensation. I am willing that you should say that I have gone far beyond the privilege of a witness invited to come before your committee. I am willing, in fact, that you should put any interpretation you like upon my use of my privilege here, only so that my neighbours of the hills shall have their matter put squarely and fully before all the people of the State.

“When this matter is once thoroughly understood by the people, then I know that no branch of the lawmaking power will dare make itself responsible for the passage of this bill.”

The Bishop stood a moment, waiting for further questions. When he saw that none were forthcoming, he thanked the committee and begged leave to retire.

As the Bishop passed out of the room the chairman arose and declared the public hearing 113 closed. Witnesses, spectators and reporters crowded out of the room and scattered through the corridors of the Capitol. Four or five reporters bunched themselves about the elevator shaft waiting for a car. One of them, a tow-haired boy of twenty, summed up the matter with irreverent brevity.

“Well, it got a fine funeral, anyway,” he said. “Not every bad bill has a bishop at the obsequies.”

“You can’t tell,” said the Associated Press man slowly; “they might report it out in spite of all that.”

“No use,” said the youngster shortly. “The Senate wouldn’t dare touch it once this stuff is in the papers.” And he jammed a wad of flimsy down into his pocket.

Three weeks of a blistering August sun had withered the grasses of the hills almost to a powder. The thin soil of the north country, where the trees have been cut away, does not hold moisture; so that the heat of the short, vicious summer goes down through the roots of the vegetation to the rock beneath and heats it as a cooking stone.

Since June there had been no rain. The tumbling hill streams were reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted timber, showing everywhere 114 the scars of the wasting rapacity of man, stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen away into the depths of the thick woods.

Ruth Lansing reined Brom Bones in under a scarred pine on the French Village road and sat looking soberly at the slopes that stretched up away from the road on either side. Every child of the hills knew the menace that a hot dry summer brought to us in those days. The first, ruthless cutting of the timber had followed the water courses. Men had cut and slashed their way up through the hills without thought of what they were leaving behind. They had taken only the prime, sound trees that stood handiest to the roll-ways. They had left dead and dying trees standing. Everywhere they had strewn loose heaps of brush and trimmings. The farmers had come pushing into the hills in the wake of the lumbermen and had cleared their pieces for corn and potatoes and hay land. But around every piece of cleared land there was an ever-encroaching ring of brush and undergrowth and fallen timber that held a constant threat for the little home within the ring.

A summer without rain meant a season of grim and unrelenting watchfulness. Men armed themselves and tramped through the woods on unbidden 115 sentry duty, to see that no campfires were made. Strangers and outsiders who were likely to be careless were watched from the moment they came into the hills until they were seen safely out of them again. Where other children scouted for and fought imaginary Indians, the children of our hills hunted and fought imaginary fires. The forest fire was to them not a tradition or a bugaboo. It was an enemy that lurked just outside the little clearing of the farm, out there in the underbrush and fallen timber.

Ruth was waiting for Jeffrey Whiting. He had ridden up to French Village for mail. For some weeks they had known that the railroad would try to have its bill for eminent domain passed at the special session of the Legislature. And they knew that the session would probably come to a close this week.

If that bill became a law, then the resistance of the people of the hills had been in vain: Jeffrey had merely led them into a bitter and useless fight against a power with which they could not cope. They would have to leave their homes, taking whatever a corrupted board of condemnation would grant for them. It would be hard on all, but it would fall upon Jeffrey with a crushing bitterness. He would have to remember that he had had the chance to make his mother and himself independently rich. He had thrown away that chance, and now if his fight had failed he would 116 have nothing to bring back to his mother but his own miserable failure.

Ruth remembered that day in the Bishop’s house in Alden when Jeffrey had said proudly that his mother would be glad to follow him into poverty. And she smiled now at her own outburst at that time. They had both meant it, every word; but the ashes of failure are bitter. And she had seen the iron of this fight biting into Jeffrey through all the summer.

She, too, would lose a great deal if the railroad had succeeded. She would not be able to go back to school, and would probably have to go somewhere to get work of some kind, for the little that she would get for her farm now would not keep her any time. But that was a little matter, or at least it seemed little and vague beside the imminence of Jeffrey’s failure and what he would consider his disgrace. She did not know how he would take it, for during the summer she had seen him in vicious moods when he seemed capable of everything.

She saw the speck which he made against the horizon as he came over Argyle Mountain three miles away and she saw that he was riding fast. He was bringing good news!

It needed only the excited, happy touch of her hand to set Brom Bones whirling up the road, for the big colt understood her ways and moods and followed them better than he would have followed 117 whip or rein of another. Half-way, she pulled the big fellow down to a decorous canter and gradually slowed down to a walk as Jeffrey came thundering down upon them. He pulled up sharply and turned on his hind feet. The two horses fell into step, as they knew they were expected to do and their two riders gave them no more heed than if they had been wooden horses.

“How did you know it was all right, Ruth?”

“I saw you coming down Argyle Mountain,” Ruth laughed. “You looked as though you were riding Victory down the top side of the earth. How did it all come out?”

“Here’s the paper,” he said, handing her an Albany newspaper of the day previous; “it tells the story right off. But I got a letter from the Bishop, too,” he added.

“Oh, did you?” she exclaimed, looking up from the headline––U. & M. Grab Killed in Committee––which she had been feverishly trying to translate into her own language. “Please let me hear. I’m never sure what headlines mean till I go down to the fine print, and then it’s generally something else. I can understand what the Bishop says, I’m sure.”

“Well, it’s only short,” said Jeffrey, unfolding the letter. “He leaves out all the part that he did himself.”

“Of course,” said Ruth simply. “He always does.”

“He says:

“‘You will see from the Albany papers, which will probably reach you before this does, that the special session of the Legislature closed to-night and that the railroad’s bill was not reported to the Senate. It had passed the Assembly, as you know. The bill aroused a measure of just public anger through the newspapers and its authors evidently thought it the part of wisdom not to risk a contest over it in the open Senate. So there can be no legislative action in favour of the railroad before December at the earliest, and I regard it as doubtful that the matter will be brought up even then.’

“You see,” said Jeffrey, “from this you’d never know that he was there present at all. And it was just his speech before the committee that aroused that public anger. Then he goes on:

“‘But we must not make the mistake of presuming that the matter ends here. You and your people are just where you were in the beginning. Nothing has been lost, nothing gained. It is not in the nature of things that a corporation which has spent an enormous amount of money in constructing a line with the one purpose of getting to your lands should now give up the idea of getting them by reason of a mere legislative setback. They have not entered into this business in any half-hearted manner. They are bound to 119 carry it through somehow––anyhow. We must realise that.

“‘We need not speculate upon the soul or the conscience of a corporation or the lack of those things. We know that this corporation will have an answer to this defeat of its bill. We must watch for that answer. What their future methods or their plans may be I think no man can tell. Perhaps those plans are not yet even formed. But there will be an answer. While rejoicing that a fear of sound public opinion has been on your side, we must never forget that there will be an answer.

“‘In this matter, young sir, I have gone beyond the limits which men set for the proper activities of a priest of the church. I do not apologise. I have done this, partly because your people are my own, my friends and my comrades of old, partly because you yourself came to me in a confidence which I do not forget, partly––and most, perhaps––because where my people and their rights are in question I have never greatly respected those limits which men set. I put these things before you so that when the answer comes you will remember that you engaged yourself in this business solely in defence of the right. So it is not your personal fight and you must try to keep from your mind and heart the bitterness of a quarrel. The struggle is a larger thing than that and you must keep your heart larger still and 120 above it. I fear that you will sorely need to remember this.

“‘My sincerest regards to your family and to all my friends in the hills, not forgetting your friend Ruth.’ That’s all,” said Jeffrey, folding the letter. “I wish he’d said more about how he managed the thing.”

“Isn’t it enough to know that he did manage it, without bothering about how? That is the way he does everything.”

“I suppose I ought to be satisfied,” said Jeffrey as he gathered up his reins. “But I wonder what he means by that last part of the letter. It sounds like a warning to me.”

“It is a warning to you,” said Ruth thoughtfully.

“Why, what does it mean? What does he think I’m likely to do?”

“Maybe he does not mean what you are likely to do exactly,” said Ruth, trying to choose her words wisely; “maybe he is thinking more of what you are likely to feel. Maybe he is talking to your heart rather than to your head or about your actions.”

“Now I don’t know what you mean, either,” said Jeffrey a little discontentedly.

“I know I oughtn’t to try to tell you what the Bishop means, for I don’t know myself. But I’ve been worried and I’m sure your mother has too,” said Ruth reluctantly.

“But what is it?” said Jeffrey quickly. “What have I been doing?”

“I’m sure it isn’t anything you’ve done, nor anything maybe that you’re likely to do. I don’t know just what it is, or how to say it. But, Jeffrey, you remember what you said that day in the Bishop’s house at Alden?”

“Yes, and I remember what you said, too.”

“We both meant it,” Ruth returned gravely, not attempting to evade any of the meaning that he had thrown into his words. “And we both mean it now, I’m sure. But there’s a difference, Jeffrey, a difference with you.”

“I don’t know it,” he said a little shortly. “I’m still doing just the thing I started out to do that day.”

“Yes. But that day you started out to fight for the people. Now you are fighting for yourself–– Oh, not for anything selfish! Not for anything you want for yourself! I know that. But you have made the fight your own. It is your own quarrel now. You are fighting because you have come to hate the railroad people.”

“Well, you wouldn’t expect me to love them?”

“No. I’m not blaming you, Jeff. But––but, I’m afraid. Hate is a terrible thing. I wish you were out of it all. Hate can only hurt you. I’m afraid of a scar that it might leave on you through all the long, long years of life. Can you see? I’m afraid of something that might go deeper 122 than all this, something that might go as deep as life. After all, that’s what I’m afraid of, I guess––Life, great, big, terrible, menacing, Life!”

“My life?” Jeffrey asked gruffly.

“I have faced that,” the girl answered evenly, “just as you have faced it. And I am not afraid of that. No. It’s what you might do in anger––if they hurt you again. Something that would scar your heart and your soul. Jeffrey, do you know that sometimes I’ve seen the worst, the worst––even murder in your eyes!”

“I wish,” the boy returned shortly, “the Bishop would keep his religion out of all this. He’s a good man and a good friend,” he went on, “but I don’t like this religion coming into everything.”

“But how can he? He cannot keep religion apart from life and right and wrong. What good would religion be if it did not go ahead of us in life and show us the way?”

“But what’s the use?” the boy said grudgingly. “What good does it do? You wouldn’t have thought of any of this only for that last part of his letter. Why does that have to come into everything? It’s the Catholic Church all over again, always pushing in everywhere.”

“Isn’t that funny,” the girl said, brightening; “I have cried myself sick thinking just that same 123 thing. I have gone almost frantic thinking that if I once gave in to the Church it would crush me and make me do everything that I didn’t want to do. And now I never think of it. Life goes along really just as though being a Catholic didn’t make any difference at all.”

“That’s because you’ve given in to it altogether. You don’t even know that you want to resist. You’re swallowed up in it.”

The girl flushed angrily, but bit her lips before she answered.

“It’s the queerest thing, isn’t it, Jeff,” she said finally in a thoughtful, friendly way, “how two people can fight about religion? Now you don’t care a particle about it one way or the other. And I––I’d rather not talk about it. And yet, we were just now within an inch of quarrelling bitterly about it. Why is it?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, Ruth,” the boy apologised slowly. “It’s none of my business, anyway.”

They were just coming over the long hill above Ruth’s home. Below them stretched the long sweep of the road down past her house and up the other slope until it lost itself around the shoulder of Lansing Mountain.

Half a mile below them a rider was pushing his big roan horse up the hill towards them at a heart-breaking pace.

“That’s ‘My’ Stocking’s roan,” said Jeffrey, straightening in his saddle; “I’d know that horse three miles away.”

“But what’s he carrying?” cried Ruth excitedly, as she peered eagerly from under her shading hand. “Look. Across his saddle. Rifles! Two of them!”

Brom Bones, sensing the girl’s excitement, was already pulling at his bit, eager for a wild race down the hill. But Jeffrey, after one long, sharp look at the oncoming horseman, pulled in quietly to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses’ knees in mad and useless dashes downhill.

The rider was Myron Stocking from over in the Crooked Lake country, as Jeffrey had supposed. He pulled up as he recognised the two who waited for him by the roadside, and when he had nodded to Ruth, whom he knew by sight, he drew over close to Jeffrey. Ruth, eager as she was to hear, pushed Brom Bones a few paces farther away from them. They would not talk freely in her hearing, she knew. And Jeffrey would tell her all that she needed to know.

The two men exchanged a half dozen rapid sentences and Ruth heard Stocking conclude:

“Your Uncle Catty slipped me this here gun o’ yours. Your Ma didn’t see.”

Jeffrey nodded and took the gun. Then he came to Ruth.

“There’s some strangers over in the hills that maybe ought to be watched. The country’s awful dry,” he added quietly. He knew that Ruth would need no further explanation.

He pulled the Bishop’s letter from his pocket and handed it to Ruth, saying:

“Take this and the paper along to Mother. She’ll want to see them right away. And say, Ruth,” he went on, as he looked anxiously at the great sloping stretches of bone-dry underbrush that lay between them and his home on the hill three miles away, “the country’s awful dry. If anything happens, get Mother and Aunt Letty down out of this country. You can make them go. Nobody else could.”

The girl had not yet spoken. There was no need for her to ask questions. She knew what lay under every one of Jeffrey’s pauses and silences. It was no time for many words. He was laying upon her a trust to look after the ones whom he loved.

She put out her hand to his and said simply:

“I’m glad we didn’t quarrel, Jeff.”

“I was a fool,” said Jeffrey gruffly, as he wrung her hand. “But I’ll remember. Forgive me, please, Ruth.”

“There’s nothing to forgive––ever––between us, Jeffrey. Go now,” she said softly.

Jeffrey wheeled his horse and followed the other man back over the hill on the road which he and Ruth had come. Ruth sat still until they were out of sight. At the very last she saw Jeffrey swing his rifle across the saddle in front of him, and a shadow fell across her heart. She would have given everything in her world to have had back what she had said of seeing murder in Jeffrey’s eyes.

Jeffrey and Myron Stocking rode steadily up the French Village road for an hour or so. Then they turned off from the road and began a long winding climb up into the higher levels of the Racquette country.

“We might as well head for Bald Mountain right away,” said Jeffrey, as they came about sundown to a fork in their trail. “The breeze comes straight down from the east. That’s where the danger is, if there is any.”

“I suppose you’re right, Jeff. But it means we’ll have to sleep out if we go that way.”

“I guess that won’t hurt us,” Jeffrey returned. “If anything happens we might have to sleep out a good many nights––and a lot of other people would have to do the same.”

“All right then,” Stocking agreed. “We’ll get a bite and give the horses a feed and a rest at Hosmer’s, that’s about two miles over the hills here; and then we can go on as far as you like.”

At Hosmer’s they got food enough for two 127 days in the hills, and having fed and breathed the horses they rode on up into the higher woods. They were now in the region of the uncut timber where the great trees were standing from the beginning, because they had been too high up to be accessible to the lumbermen who had ravaged the lower levels. Though the long summer twilight of the North still lighted the tops of the trees, the two men rode in impenetrable darkness, leaving the horses to pick their own canny footing up the trail.

“Did anybody see Rogers in that crowd?” Jeffrey asked as they rode along. “You know, the man that was in French Village this summer.”

“I don’t know,” Stocking answered. “You see they came up to the end of the rails, at Grafton, on a handcar. And then they scattered. Nobody’s sure that he’s seen any of ’em since. But they must be in the hills somewhere. And Rafe Gadbeau’s with ’em. You can bet on that. That’s all we’ve got to go on. But it may be a-plenty.”

“It’s enough to set us on the move, anyway,” said Jeffrey. “They have no business in the hills. They’re bound to be up to mischief of some sort. And there’s just one big mischief that they can do. Can we make Bald Mountain before daylight?”

“Oh, certainly; that’ll be easy. We’ll get a little light when we’re through this belt of heavy 128 woods and then we can push along. We ought to get up there by two o’clock. It ain’t light till near five. That’ll give us a little sleep, if we feel like it.”

True to Stocking’s calculation they came out upon the rocky, thinly grassed knobs of Bald Mountain shortly before two o’clock. It was a soft, hazy night with no moon. There was rain in the air somewhere, for there was no dew; but it might be on the other side of the divide or it might be miles below on the lowlands.

Others of the men of the hills were no doubt in the vicinity of the mountain, or were heading toward here. For the word of the menace had gone through the hills that day, and men would decide, as Jeffrey had done, that the danger would come from this direction. But they had not heard anything to show the presence of others, nor did they care to give any signals of their own whereabouts.

As for those others, the possible enemy, who had left the railroad that morning and had scattered into the hills, if their purpose was the one that men feared, they, too, would be near here. But it was useless to look for them in the dark: neither was anything to be feared from them before morning. Men do not start forest fires in the night. There is little wind. A fire would probably die out of itself. And the first blaze would rouse the whole country.

The two hobbled their horses with the bridle reins and lay down in the open to wait for morning. Neither had any thought of sleep. But the softness of the night, the pungent odour of the tamarack trees floating up to them from below, and their long ride, soon began to tell on them. Jeffrey saw that they must set a watch.

“Curl up and go to sleep, ‘My,’” he said, shaking himself. “You might as well. I’ll wake you in an hour.”

A ready snore was the only answer.

Morning coming over the higher eastern hills found them stiff and weary, but alert. The woods below them were still banked in darkness as they ate their dry food and caught their horses for the day that was before them. There was no water to be had up here, and they knew their horses must be gotten down to some water course before night.

A half circle of open country belted by heavy woods lay just below them. Eagerly, as the light crept down the hill, they scanned the area for sign of man or horse. Nothing moved. Apparently they had the world to themselves. A fresh morning breeze came down over the mountain and watching they could see the ripple of it in the tops of the distant trees. The same thought made both men grip their rifles and search more carefully the ground below them, for that innocent breeze blowing straight down towards their homes 130 and loved ones was a potential enemy more to be feared than all the doings of men.

Down to the right, two miles or more away, a man came out of the shadow of the woods. They could only see that he was a big man and stout. There was nothing about him to tell them whether he was friend or foe, of the hills or a stranger. Without waiting to see who he was or what he did, the two dove for their saddles and started their horses pell-mell down the hill towards him.

He saw them at once against the bare brow of the hill, and ran back into the wood.

In another instant they knew what he was and what was his business.

They saw a light moving swiftly along the fringe of the woods. Behind the light rose a trail of white smoke. And behind the smoke ran a line of living fire. The man was running, dragging a flaming torch through the long dried grass and brush!

The two, riding break-neck down over the rocks, regardless of paths or horses’ legs, would gladly have killed the man as he ran. But it was too far for even a random shot. They could only ride on in reckless rage, mad to be at the fire, to beat it to death with their hands, to stamp it into the earth, but more eager yet for a right distance and a fair shot at the fiend there within the wood.

Before they had stumbled half the distance down the hill, a wave of leaping flame a hundred 131 feet long was hurling itself upon the forest. They could not stamp that fire out. But they could kill that man!

The man ran back behind the wall of fire to where he had started and began to run another line of fire in the other direction. At that moment Stocking yelled:

“There’s another starting, straight in front!”

“Get him,” Jeffrey shouted over his shoulder. “I’m going to kill this one.”

Stocking turned slightly and made for a second light which he had seen starting. Jeffrey rode on alone, unslinging his rifle and driving madly. His horse, already unnerved by the wild dash down the hill, now saw the fire and started to bolt off at a tangent. Jeffrey fought with him a furious moment, trying to force him toward the fire and the man. Then, seeing that he could not conquer the fright of the horse and that his man was escaping, he threw his leg over the saddle, and leaping free with his gun ran towards the man.

The man was dodging in and out now among the trees, but still using his torch and moving rapidly away.

Jeffrey ran on, gradually overhauling the man in his zigzag until he was within easy distance. But the man continued weaving his way among the trees so that it was impossible to get a fair aim. Jeffrey dropped to one knee and steadied the sights 132 of his rifle until they closed upon the running man and clung to him.

Suddenly the man turned in an open space and faced about. It was Rogers, Jeffrey saw. He was unarmed, but he must be killed.

“I am going to kill him,” said Jeffrey under his breath, as he again fixed the sights of his rifle, this time full on the man’s breast.

A shot rang out in front somewhere. Rogers threw up his hands, took a half step forward, and fell on his face.

Jeffrey, his finger still clinging to the trigger which he had not pulled, ran forward to where the man lay.

He was lying face down, his arms stretched out wide at either side, his fingers convulsively clutching at tufts of grass.

He was dying. No need for a second look.

His hat had fallen off to a little distance. There was a clean round hole in the back of the skull. The close-cropped, iron grey hair showed just the merest streak of red.

Just out of reach of one of his hands lay a still flaming railroad torch, with which he had done his work.

Jeffrey peered through the wood in the direction from which the shot had come. There was no smoke, no noise of any one running away, no sign of another human being anywhere.

Away back of him he heard shots, one, two, 133 three; Stocking, probably, or some of the other men who must be in the neighbourhood, firing at other fleeing figures in the woods.

He grabbed the burning torch, pulled out the wick and stamped it into a patch of burnt ground, threw the torch back from the fire line, and started clubbing the fire out of the grass with the butt of his rifle.

He was quickly brought to his senses, when the forgotten cartridge in his gun accidentally exploded and the bullet went whizzing past his ear. He dropped the gun nervously and finding a sharp piece of sapling he began to work furiously, but systematically at the line of fire.

The line was thin here, where it had really only that moment been started, and he made some headway. But as he worked along to where it had gotten a real start he saw that it was useless. Still he clung to his work. It was the only thing that his numbed brain could think of to do for the moment.

He dug madly with the sapling, throwing the loose dirt furiously after the fire as it ran away from him. He leaped upon the line of the fire and stamped at it with his boots until the fire crept up his trousers and shirt and up even to his hair. And still the fire ran away from him, away down the hill after its real prey. He looked farther on along the line and saw that it was not now a line but a charging, rushing river of flame that ran 134 down the hill, twenty feet at a jump. Nothing, nothing on earth, except perhaps a deluge of rain could now stop that torrent of fire.

He stepped back. There was nothing to be done here now, behind the fire. Nothing to be done but to get ahead of it and save what could be saved. He looked around for his horse.

Just then men came riding along the back of the line, Stocking and old Erskine Beasley in the lead. They came up to where Jeffrey was standing and looked on beyond moodily to where the body of Rogers lay.

Jeffrey turned and looked, too. A silence fell upon the little group of horsemen and upon the boy standing there.

Myron Stocking spoke at last:

“Mine got away, Jeff,” he said slowly.

Jeffrey looked up quickly at him. Then the meaning of the words flashed upon him.

“I didn’t do that!” he exclaimed hastily. “Somebody else shot him from the woods. My gun went off accidental.”

Silence fell again upon the little group of men. They did not look at Jeffrey. They had heard but one shot. The shot from the woods had been too muffled for them to hear.

Again Stocking broke the silence.

“What difference does it make,” he said. “Any of us would have done it if we could.”

“But I didn’t! I tell you I didn’t,” shouted 135 Jeffrey. “The shot from the woods got ahead of me. That man was facing me. He was shot from behind!”

Old Erskine Beasley took command.

“What difference does it make, as Stocking says. We’ve got live men and women and children to think about to-day,” he said. “Straighten him out decent. Then divide and go around the fire both ways. The alarm can’t travel half fast enough for this breeze, and it’s rising, too,” he added.

“But I tell you––!” Jeffrey began again. Then he saw how useless it was.

He looked up the hill and saw his horse, which even in the face of this unheard-of terror had preferred to venture back toward his master.

He caught the horse, mounted, and started to ride south with the party that was to try to get around the fire from that side.

He rode with them. They were his friends. But he was not with them. There was a circle drawn around him. He was separated from them. They probably did not feel it, but he felt it. It is a circle which draws itself ever around a man who, justly or unjustly, is thought guilty of blood. Men may applaud his deed. Men may say that they themselves would wish to have done it. But the circle is there.

Then Jeffrey thought of his Mother. She would not see that circle.

Also he thought of a girl. The girl had only a few hours before said that she had sometimes seen even murder in his eyes.